Pages

Friday, 2 October 2009

THOSE WHO SHALL NOT LIVE BY THE LAW, SHALL DIE BY THE LAW!

A few the words occurred to me this morning as I got ready to start the day .....

"The Ten Commandments" starring Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, has always been among my all time favorite movies. Other than the amazing soundtrack, the fantastic script was definitely among the best quotable quotes of movie scripts.Two among them,"So let it be written, so let it be done" and"Those who shall not live by the law, shall die by the law!",were in my opinion, central to the theme of the storyline in the movie - and of course, the three great Abrahamic religions that we know of today.

Since the time of Hammurabi, the written law/constitution has also been central to most great civilizations of the past and has been the essential foundation of all modern nation states of the present. The nation states that refused to honour and live by their constitutions however, have more often than not descended into being what we call "banana republics" ruled by autocrats, wherein the peoples' rights are trampled upon at the whim and fancy of the ruling elite, and the dispossessed have no legal recourse to attend to their grievances. Many an "Islamic" state (by their own definition) today fall under this category - and Malaysia is fast heading towards joining the ranks of these "banana republics".

The Malaysian Federal Constitution has been amended more than 600 times within a short span of fifty years, to make mortar out of the blood of the people, in order to facilitate the rule of the enriched elite. The executive (aka the ruling BN politicians) in Malaysia have not spared any effort at usurping the power of the people by destroying the independence of all the institutions of democracy - the Monarchy, legislature and the Judiciary, are all equally powerless and in shambles, more so since the time of Mahathir. In the process, BN (particularly Umno, I suppose) has also got the Police and the Army (including all the allied security services)to serve these elite, so as to consolidate their position - or at least that is how it appears to the people.

If we were to go by the many exposes of RPK, they've also taken to supporting those in the underworld against those who stood for righteousness within the system. Faced with the impending collapse of their rule, civil society and social order, the BN leadership has taken to silencing dissent through various underhanded tactics and unconstitutional laws. They have also resorted to making lame attempts at restoring confidence through their propaganda machinery which churns out lies after simplistic lies to feed the minds of unthinking "proles", in order to protect the interests of these criminals in the D&Gs, Guccis and Pradas. We've heard it all - from "Bersih, Cekap, Amanah", "Wawasan 2020", "Work with me, not for me", "Cemerlang, Gemilang, Terbilang", "Islam Hadhari", and now, the greatest of them all - "1-Malaysia"!!

The faults of the administration and the system is pinned on all but themselves, as they goad the people to adopt virtues and laws which they themselves despise. They will not admit that they themselves who are morally corrupt, are the root of all the corruption and evil that permeates our society. They divide into ghettos by design, the very society they ask to unite. They plunder the very resources they claim to have generated, while they rape the land they claim to protect.

With Mahathir suggesting that "we change our strategy" to achieve his "Wawasan 2020", I'm reminded of what was said in Atlas Shrugged -"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard - the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money - the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue.In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them.

But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law - men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims - then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it.Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter. "Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money".

Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."

Yes - watch the money as it dries up, for it is the barometer of society. As the FDI on which our economy evaporates, the people get restless as hunger pangs set in and pirates are rewarded with ministerial posts for their "incompetency by design", the words of Tun Dr. Ismail will prove prophetic. It is a matter of time that the people rise to demand the nation back from the pirate who rule them today. The ruling elite who do not live by the law, shall sooner or later die by the law of causality.